Platform Socialism: Democratizing the Internet

The interview was part of the International Strategy Center’s Progressive Forum where we interviewed James Mudoon, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter, a research association at the Oxford Internet Institute, and head of digital research at the Autonomy think tank. The interview was conducted by Mariam Ibrahim and edited for clarity and brevity by Matthew Phillips.    

ISC: Can you give us a brief background about yourself as well as telling us about what writing this book was like and what inspired and informed it?

James: My background is in law and philosophy. I worked as a human rights lawyer for three years before I was an academic and I did my Ph.D. in philosophy and now I work in a political science department. The book Platform Socialism is about how we can create fairer alternatives to today's digital platforms. What would a more social just media system look like? What would a fairer Internet search engine look like? And how would we organize these? One of the reasons I decided to write the book was I wanted to give the perspective of someone outside the tech industry. So someone who started from the political questions rather than the technical ones. And I think that kind of critical perspective was lacking at the time. I think the real contribution of my book was to try to turn questions away from the focus on privacy and surveillance and turn to questions of power, ownership and control. What I wanted to do was to show that we shouldn't just try to fix and repair Facebook, but we should actually be seeking wholesale alternatives and developing ideas about how they could be built. So in a nutshell: Platform Socialism is about exploring alternative models of ownership and searching for new parties, temporary forms of governance, of these digital platforms.

ISC: Many of us have had the opportunity to read your book, but there may be some listening who have not had that chance. So could you briefly explain this idea of “platform socialism?”

James: Platform Socialism is about reinventing the Internet and reimagining how digital platforms could operate. More specifically, it's about focusing on what we could call social ownership, ways in which platforms could be owned and governed by the communities that use them. So this idea of social ownership is a bit broader than two common ideas we have: state-owned nationalization on the one hand, and worker-controlled services on the other. Rather than the state or a small collection of workers having exclusive rights over the platform, Platform Socialism allows us to consider how broader communities of users might play a small role in the governance of these platforms. What was also really important for me about platform socialism was that it offered an exciting vision of an alternative to the current big tech platforms and it gave us a new social imagination for conceptualizing and working out what these alternatives might look like. I wrote the book at a time of great cynicism towards digital platforms and tech companies, but I don't think we should let this cynicism become a wholesale rejection of technology and the positive role it could play in our lives. At the time the book was written the two most transformative visions for 2030 were Web 3.0 and the Metaverse. Both have since collapsed and were deeply flawed from the beginning. But I wanted to offer an alternative that gave a more positive vision for what digital platforms could look like.

ISC: How do you see your work relating to other work and projects within the rest of academia?

James: I think academia is a place in which certain radical ideas can flourish and it certainly has the institutional conditions to guarantee people a limited degree of freedom to explore what they want. But at the same time there are also structural constraints which incentivize people to produce certain kinds of work that will guarantee them promotion and acceptance in mainstream tech circles. At the time of writing the book the two main criticisms of tech were something that I would call a tech humanist critique and secondly, an antitrust critique. 

So the first was what I call a tech humanist critique [perhaps best exemplified] by writers like Shoshana Zuboff, author of Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Hers is a commonly held position within academia and it is a criticism of technology from a humanist understanding. What the tech humanists like Zuboff would tell us is that technology and platforms undermine our autonomy. They circumvent our rational decision making process to turn us into automatons or rats in a cage. I believe this perspective focuses too much on the individual and it doesn't understand the political nature of the problem or the underlying structural issues with the political economy of the digital economy. CEOs [even if they wanted to] are not able to act more ethically and consumers [though they often want to] are often not able to leave these platforms because of the structural incentives that exist in markets that require people to remain competitive against their peers.

The second prominent criticism within academia is the antitrust position. The antitrust critic would like us to promote small- and medium-sized enterprises within the tech sector and enhance competition in order to deliver greater benefits for the consumer. This criticism, embodied by slogans such as “break up big tech,” captures a more accurate picture of the tech sector, seeing that too many tech companies are [in fact] too big and too powerful and require greater regulation and control.

However, I disagree with the ultimate solution of further entrenching the marketization of online spaces because I think we should be looking towards non-market based solutions.  So while these two perspectives are dominant in academia, other more radical criticisms are also present: authors such as Gavin Miller and Jason Sadowski and indeed Nick Srnicek, who you read last week.

And in many ways it makes sense to read my book after Nick Srnicek’s book, because I was inspired by it and I wrote it as a kind of successor book.

ISC: Earlier, you were talking a little bit about how within academia there are some radical ideas, but that's not really incentivized because of the structures that exist. But do you see any shifts or movements within academia towards these kinds of more radical imagined futures?

James: Two quick points on this. One is that academia is a contradictory space in which different types of people flourish. On the one hand, there has been more people talking about questions of ownership and control, particularly younger scholars. On the other hand, academe is also constantly in search of [some] new hype. And at the moment that's AI. A lot of interest has moved from platforms to forms of artificial intelligence. So some of the debates have moved on a little bit, and academics aren't as interested in talking about questions of data, dividends, and ownership of platforms and ownership of data because it's less trendy to do so in 2023. At the same time I don't really think academia is the most important place we should be looking for alternatives. It's much better to look to social movements and activists who are actually developing the alternatives that could be used. 

ISC: How has neoliberalism contributed to this destruction of communities? And what is Facebook and these other big social media platforms impact on community and our sense and idea of community. 

James: The most important changes that neoliberalism has brought about in relation to community has been the erosion of what could be called intermediary organizations: associations in society and institutions such as trade unions, political parties, and, in many ways, religious organizations. These [all] were a great source of political solidarity for many people. These organizations were gradually eroded through the seventies and eighties on account of some of the economic restructuring that was happening.

In addition to the erosion of these organizations, neoliberal ideology also pits individuals in a stiffer competition against one another and encourages them to see themselves as micro capitalists that all have a small resource they can develop and build upon in competition with their peers.

Third, [on this first question,] the globalization of capital and the development of new communications technology allowed businesses to outsource processes throughout the globe, which further divided the sense of solidarity that workers could have with each other. Because suddenly every component of the process of the production of a good or service can be done in five or six different locations across the globe.

So how does Facebook see itself as helping in this loss of community from about 2015 or 2016 onwards, many tech companies began to tell a story of themselves as global community builders, as ideally placed to solve some of the problems that they themselves had partly brought about.

The traditional critique of these tech companies was that people would spend more time using tech products, more time alone and more time isolated from others. But the narrative that Facebook and others wanted to sell was of them as pivotal connectors that brought people together and facilitated a new form of community, an online community.

In the book, I call this strategy “community washing,” drawing on more well-known ideas of greenwashing or pinkwashing. This is a marketing strategy of framing an extractive business model through the language of community empowerment and the company fulfilling a social mission.

What I argue in the book is that there is very little substance to their claims of promoting community and that it is a public relations campaign that is rather cynical. If you look at the development of the companies, this so-called mission is only developed a long time after the company has already matured and can be seen as an effort to respond to criticisms of the company and its activities.

And the reality of the tech companies relationship to community is that it is largely exploitative of the very communities they claim to serve. Facebook pays no money to its users and makes billions of profits off them. And Airbnb can be seen to lead to gentrification and the rising of house prices in the communities which often push out local residents in favor of a huge amounts of short-term rental properties.

ISC: You know we're seeing a lot of polarized debates. And while that may be just a reflection of an increasingly polarized society, they're also fueled by these social media algorithms. We get these echo chambers and platforms like Parler. I'm curious about your thoughts about how the democratization of social media for example, or the realization of platform socialism could potentially address these kinds of problems.

James: That the most important change it would make is that the organizations who run social media platforms would not be structurally incentivized to promote the most outrageous and controversial of content in order to generate profit.

Content moderation could be conducted according to similar principles that govern other public broadcasters in terms of transparency and fairness.

However, we also have to acknowledge the limits of proposals for democratic ownership and that they are not a solution to all political problems that exist. Conflict would still exist. People with extreme opinions would still exist and there is a limit to what democratic control could do about these problems.